


you will bend and tell me that you love me

by writesbystarfruit



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abusive Parents, Abusive Relationships, Bittersweet Ending, Canon Compliant, Captain America: The First Avenger, Irish Sarah Rogers, Irish Steve Rogers, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Sad, Sad Ending, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 11:18:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20777699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writesbystarfruit/pseuds/writesbystarfruit
Summary: As thousands of needles stabbed his paper-thin skin, as his organs pushed against the frail container of his body, as he felt like he would explode, as every part of him ached and burned, as he knew he would die in this suffocating metal sarcophagus, Steve thought of Bucky.Or...The heartbreaking story of two boys in Brooklyn who just wanted to go home, told through the Irish ballad "Danny Boy."





	you will bend and tell me that you love me

Steve only has vague memories of his father. When the Roaring Twenties were in full swing: a full-bellied laugh here, a pair of warm hands there, a whiff of rich cologne and stubbly kisses on the cheek. After Dad lost his job: the nauseating scent of cheap alcohol, harsh reprimands and hollered commands, slaps to the face and disgust glinting in his glazed eyes. When he passed, Steve was a mere six years old.

At the funeral, he remembered clutching onto Ma’s trembling hand, watching as the mahogany casket was lowered into the grave. The funeral service nearly emptied out all of their savings, leaving nothing but dust and mothballs in the loose floorboard of their apartment. It left Sarah working 18 hours a day to piece together enough money for meager scraps of food. It left Steve shivering under a ragged, holey blanket that did little to ward off freezing Brooklyn winters. It may have been then, after catching a bout of acute pneumonia, that his lungs started to fail him. He remembered thinking that a funeral was more than Dad deserved.

Steve cried for the man he wished he knew, not the alcoholic who would abuse him and Ma day and night.

But Sarah Rogers was devastated. To her, Joseph Rogers was not the violent, degrading drunk of his later years. He was the child who saved her from a gang of reckless, wild-eyed robbers when she was eight years old. He was the boy who could charm anyone - adult, child, or even animal - into indulging in his playful antics. He was the bright-eyed youth with astronomical ideas and endless energy. He was the one who promised Sarah the stars and gifted her with the night sky. He was the one who saved her from the poor farm life of Ireland-- who brought Sarah to the City of Dreams, more beautiful than any galaxy. He was the man whom she married, whom she loved, whom she would stay faithful to until the end of her days.

And so Sarah cried. Sob after sob, her tears dripped onto the damp soil below his gravestone, still loose after the recent burial. She thought back to the carefree summer days of her childhood, lush green meadows and grazing cattle. She could almost taste the bright sunshine on her lips, could almost hear her mother’s dulcet tones crooning an Irish melody, could almost feel Joseph’s warm presence enveloping her in a gentle hug - a stark contrast to the merciless blows rained down on Sarah’s frail body in his later years.

Her sobs eventually trailed off into the bittersweet ballad of the Irish, the familiar song of Danny Boy.

Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling  
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.  
The summer's gone, and all the roses falling,  
‘Tis you, ‘tis you must go and I must bide.  
But come ye back when summer's in the meadow,  
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow,  
‘Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow,  
Oh, Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so!  
But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,  
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,  
You'll come and find the place where I am lying,  
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.  
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,  
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,  
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,  
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.

Steve’s memories of his father may have been blurry, but he could all-too-clearly remember his Ma singing softly to Dad’s grave every day, month after month, year after year, whether “in sunshine or in shadow.”

The familiar tune of Danny Boy became a constant in Steve’s life: he would hear it at the cemetery, injected with endless grief and longing and love, as a thoughtless melody as Sarah pittered around the apartment, as a lullaby when Steve had fallen particularly sick (more often than not).

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Sarah died in 1936. Steve was 18.

He wished he could’ve done better for her. He wished he could’ve afforded a mahogany casket and a tombstone engraved with archangels and a funeral service fit for a queen because that’s what his Ma was - an angel among humans, a queen among peasants. She had given him all she had: her time, her love, her knowledge, her food, her life. If Steve hadn’t been so incapable and sick all the goddamn time, maybe she wouldn’t have had to work overtime in order to pay for his expensive medication, and maybe she wouldn’t have succumbed to tuberculosis, and maybe she wouldn’t have died--

But as it was, he barely had enough money for two meals a day. The best he could do was a simple burial service next to Joseph and her golden wedding ring she so treasured.

As he stood there with his mother’s cold dead body six feet beneath his shoes, he suddenly understood how Ma felt when his father died. 

Heartbroken.

The heavens poured down a deluge of tears. Steve did too. They mourned the loss of an angel. 

And Steve sung. His voice, rough with sobs and hoarse with grief, wobbled throughout the somber graveyard. 

He just wished he could see his Ma one more time.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After Bucky arrived home from the Stark Expo, there was but 5 hours until he was to be shipped off to England - to fight in a war where soldiers came back heavily disfigured, missing an eye or a limb, where men were slaughtered by the dozens every minute, where the Allied and Axis leaders blindly traded the lives of terrified young men, where armies left a bloody trail of carnage and rubble behind them.

He reeked of sex, alcohol, and a woman’s perfume.

It was Steve’s last chance to be with him before God-knows-when, and there Bucky was, fucking girls he barely knew at three in the morning. Irrationally, Steve felt a tidal wave of ferocious anger rushing up his lungs, up, up, up, cresting in the bewildered face of a tipsy Bucky.

He yelled. Bucky, wounded with Steve’s accusations, yelled back. It was a cacophony of furious retaliation, justified (or so each person believed) vexation, and an underlying current of desperation.

The clock ticked. Bucky would leave in 4 hours.

Steve sat stoically on their ratty couch. Nothing Bucky said would move him - not insults, not jokes, not reminiscent memories, not even begging pleads. “Come on, Stevie, please talk to me,” he would cajole, kneeling on the threadbare carpet and trying to catch his eyes in vain. “I have to leave soon. Stevie, please.”

The clock ticked. 3 more hours.

Bucky gave up eventually, heading to his bed for a short nap.

The clock ticked. 2 more hours.

And in that quiet Brooklyn apartment, with the pearlescent pre-dawn light floating in through the window, Steve sang. He sang the Irish ballad as a promise: that Bucky would come back to him, alive and whole and okay and not dead, that they would meet again in the dingy Brooklyn apartment - their safe haven, their meadowed valley sheltered from the raging blizzards of the outside world.

The clock ticked. 1 more hour.

Bucky padded silently into the living room; only his fond huff of laughter after Steve’s final notes warned him of his presence.

“Steve, you punk. I’ll be just fine,” Bucky reassured. “What’re you doing, singing tunes about you and me dying? I ain’t gonna leave you.”

Steve tried to hold on to his simmering fury, but alarmingly, he could feel it transform into burning hot tears. They leaked from his eyes, carving trails into his cheeks and blurring his (already terrible) eyesight. Bucky closely resembled an amorphous shifting blob to him at this point.

“How can you promise that, Bucky? Remember Charlie Harrington? He volunteered to serve in the British draft, and his ma just received one of those fancy military letters three days ago. Says he’d been killed in action. And how about Richie Barros? Heard he was involved in some sorta bomb test in Jersey. They say he’s brain dead now. He’ll never wake up -”

Bucky interrupts with a placating sigh. “Stevie, stop worrying. I won’t ever leave you, alright? You’re my best guy.”

Steve shakes his head. Bucky’s platitudes have no use when both of them know they’re just false empty lies. “You know how many men die on the front every day? You know how many of them promised they’d be safe, that they’d survive? Buck… what if - what if you don’t come back home?” His voice trailed off into a frightened whisper.

Bucky took one glance at Steve’s crumpled expression and worried eyes before pulling him into a tight hug. Their bodies melded together, Steve’s head tucked snugly under Bucky’s chin, both arms wrapped tightly around his chest, and legs slotted to fit perfectly.

“Stevie, it’ll be alright. I’m with you till the end of the line, okay?” Bucky murmured softly into his silk-like blond hair.

The only answer was the minute trembling of Steve’s rail thin shoulders and a hot dampness slowly spreading on the cloth covering his chest.

The clock ticked. Time was up.

The thousands of soldiers aboard the USS New York were dressed sharply in their crisp uniforms, looking every inch the army that the Allies proclaimed would win them the war. Bucky was a mere speck among them, but Steve could almost sense his magnetic presence; extraordinary bravery and a solemn earnestness masked by effortless charm and light-hearted ease. 

Steve stood as far out as he dared to on the dock, waving until his arm felt like it would fall off. The harbor was thrumming with a massive crowd of crying mothers and worried wives, proud fathers and wistful children piled one on top of the other. 

The USS New York, the Grim Reaper of young men with their whole lives ahead of them, would carry many of them to their graves. 

Steve prayed to God that Bucky would come back alive and safe.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As thousands of needles stabbed his paper-thin skin, as his organs pushed against the frail container of his body, as he felt like he would explode, as every part of him ached and burned, as he knew he would die in this suffocating metal sarcophagus, Steve thought of Bucky.

He thought of Bucky’s effervescent smile that could light up the heavens. He thought of the effortless quirk of his lips, that easy charm that could capture the heart of any dame. He thought of Bucky’s warm hugs and his boisterous laughs. He thought of his earnest talks and his daring bravery. Steve thought of Bucky defending him countless times during fistfights in alleys, brawls in the courtyard, and bullies at school. He thought of his never ending patience - helping Steve through embarrassing asthma attacks and deadly bouts of sickness and all-nighters of vomiting and wounds inflicted by fights and --

And he realized he loved Bucky.

Too bad Steve would be dead when - if - he returned from the front.

Steve thought of the song:

And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,  
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,  
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,  
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.

God, Steve could almost feel it - Bucky and his Ma waiting for him with gentle smiles on their faces, healthier and happier than ever, arms outstretched to welcome him into their embrace, and Steve grinned so hard his face felt like it was splitting in half and he reached for their hands and --

The doors of the sarcophagus opened. The procedure was over.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Steve thought he hit rock bottom when Sarah Rogers died.

He thought wrong.

Clutching onto that icy metal rail as the wind sliced through his uniform, Steve realized how much worse it was.

Bucky was leaving him.

Bucky wasn't with him until the end of the line.

Bucky wasn’t going home.

Bucky was...

dead.

Oh god, what has Steve done?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Two days later, Steve told Peggy, “I’ve got to put her in the water.”

He could hear the wobble of unshed tears in Peggy’s normally composed voice. He almost wanted her to drop the act - they both knew Steve’s intentions; there was no use pretending anything different. But for her sake, Steve held on to the pretense. 

He didn’t have the heart to tell her his soul had already fallen into the abyss with Bucky as well.

The plane groaned and creaked in protest as he decisively shoved the navigation stick down. Objects slid past his chair and crashed through the gaping holes in the Valkyrie. They tumbled down instantly, swallowed into the endless, bleak plain of white. Steve steadfastedly tried to ignore his final fate of following those objects into the plunge. Sunlight glared on the forbidding ice below, throwing spots of blinding white into his vision. The ground approached, looming as if it were the wall to the frigid Gates of Hell. 

(Because who was Steve kidding, he was not a good person. After all those fights, picked just to satisfy his own endless pit of anger, after all those promises never to be fulfilled, after failing to save the one person who always, always protected him -- well, Steve’s one-way ticket to Hell was practically guaranteed.)

The wind was shards of ice penetrating his pores. It screamed in his ears, a repetitive shriek of “why did you let him fall why did you let him go why why why why whywhywhywhywhywhywhy --”

An earthshaking crash.

He could feel the vibrations rattle his skull, his teeth, his bones; the very atoms of his body jarred.

The screeching, alien sounds of ice gouging out metal screamed in his ears.

As the freezing water rushed into the plane, Steve shakily unbuckled himself from the chair. He crawled to a stop on the floor, breath already escaping in white plumes. 

The unbearable pain of the ice gradually faded into numbness.

As he lay there on the ground, the carcass of a dying plane and broken promises surrounding him, he finally closed his eyes and smiled.

The echoes of Ma’s high voice thrummed in his mind:

And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,  
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,  
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,  
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.

Maybe Steve could see her again.

Maybe he could see Bucky.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! hope you enjoyed the fic!!!
> 
> please leave comments/kudos :))
> 
> constructive criticism and feedback are greatly appreciated.


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